The house in Taos

It wasn’t in Taos, but out of town, in the Ranchos de Taos. I don’t know how we came to be offered this house, but somebody offered it to us for a month of vacation. So we drove there. Christopher was nine months old, and I was still nursing him, so he was somewhat portable.

So it was just this very small family in a very small adobe house, and we didn’t know anybody right around. The people who lived around there were Spanish speaking, kind of rural. I used to put Christopher in a cardboard box in the yard, and all the little girls going back and forth to school would stop to play with him.

Then there was a come-all-ye for volunteers to put out a forest fire, and Peattie [her first husband] went to fight it. It was still quite cold, and every time Peattie tried to put out bits of the fire, he would find groups of locals gathered around it keeping warm and cussing him for trying to put it out. So it was just Christopher and me, and Peattie had taken the car.

It was all very spare. The family was spare, and the house was spare. It had a dirt floor, not loose dirt but pounded, not shiny, but with a firm adobe surface to it. For heat, wood, a metal stove or one of those corner adobe stoves. When it snowed, I would go up a ladder to the roof and sweep the snow off so the roof, also adobe,  wouldn’t be damaged. It was lovely living in adobe, in this earthy environment. You were right out of the mechanical world. I never met the owner, somehow. I think his name was Bright. He was an artist or poet or something of the sort. It was the perfect house for a poet.

That must be where I wrote my master’s thesis about being a Meskwaki Indian. I copied my notes and cut them into little slips of paper, and sorted them into different aspects of being a Meskwaki Indian. I liked doing it in this very simple, primitive, non-coded way, and I think that the floor I sorted the notes on was that floor. That’s the way I remember it – the little slips of paper on the dirt floor.

The air was very clear.